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Weekly Review: Owari No Seraph (Seraph of the End)

November 9th, 2018 user

Family. Family is the single-most important thing in this world of terror and agony. At least, that is what Mika and Yu believe. They are both a mere twelve years old, living with their makeshift family of many children younger than them in a small house within the confines of a vampire plantation. Every day they must give blood; it is their job as livestock. However, Mika has a plan for their escape. What he didn’t know, is it would cost the lives of his entire family, including himself, with the one exception that lies within Yu. On the night that their family desperately tries to escape the plantation, Yu is the only one that lives.

Four years later, Yu is now a part of the Japanese Imperial Demon Army. He has sworn his life to take revenge on the vampires for his family’s massacre. The only problem is he has to have a cursed weapon to do so, and only the vampire extermination unit has those. Nevertheless, he doesn’t give up. He eventually is able to join the vampire extermination unit, but learns the horrible truth behind what it means. He must make a pact with a demon in order to use the cursed weapon, and at every second the demon will try to take over him. Even then, with the demon’s power at his side, the power gap between humans and strong vampires known as nobles, is still great. Yu is going to have a long, terrible journey ahead of him if he hopes to become strong enough to defeat all of the vampires.

So now that we have the basic story out of the way, let’s get down to business. So, it’s a fantasy anime, right? Right. Basically, I would consider it an action / friendship anime series, with lots of drama. Lots, and lots, of drama. The overall plot of the anime seems pretty amazing, I mean I was pretty stoked whenever I first heard of it. Powerful cursed humans fighting even more powerful vampires in a fight to the death, let’s rumble! Of course, I soon realized that my hopes would be crushed very swiftly. You see, the anime, though it has action in it, does not focus on that. The entire show is more geared toward Mika and Yu, and their desperation to get back to one another after, spoiler alert, Yu learns that Mika is alive. Just one tiny problem though, Mika is a vampire.

The story progresses at a good pace, I would say. We get to see Yu, who doesn’t care about anyone except his now dead family, slowly open up to the people that become his squad, and eventually family. Side note, the word family gets thrown around a lot in this series. We get to see him grow, get more powerful, along with his new friends / family. Which is nice. Of course, the anime has a real problem with showing us just exactly how powerful he is. What I mean is in one scene he is uber powerful, then the next he gets smacked around like a noob. C’mon, pick one or the other.

Now, as I said before I would consider this to be within the action genre, however, it is a very bad action anime. The fight scenes in this anime are either completely skipped, or very short and not satisfying in the least. There is also a speed issue that happens a lot. Sometimes the people are fast, other times they are moving in slow motion. Not to mention I think the people producing the show just flat out forgot where people were supposed to be in what scenes. For example, Yu jumps forward, gets into a fight with two vampires, shoots forward again to save his friend, while killing another vampire, all the while the other friends / enemies just stood there looking at each other. Plus, he’s on the other side of the room now. In the VERY next scene, they are all together again, like nothing happened. Um… what?

All in all, it’s okay. If you are really wanting to watch an anime that has some in-depth fight scenes, skip this one. If you are more into drama and friendship kind of deal, then this may be for you. I would say it’s not the anime for me, but that’s kind of hard to say after I watched both seasons. Safe to say I’m still waiting for a descent fight scene.

Lastly, I’m pretty sure the humans would of wiped out all of the vampire nobles by now if they would stop trying to get in a last, cool sounding line before striking the enemy. Just saying.